Volunteers’ Week is as much about recruiting new volunteers as it is thanking existing ones.
Photograph: travelib/Alamy

Volunteers’ Week starts on Thursday and there will be hundreds of events across the UK to showcase the contribution of volunteers to our society, from youth work in Penzance to dog rescue in Ayrshire.

The mood will be celebratory and rightly so, but there should also be pause for thought. Volunteering does not appear to be growing, possibly at all and certainly not in the way it must if it is to go some way to filling the yawning gaps carved in our public services by austerity cuts.

Volunteers are now running libraries, maintaining parks and staffing hospital reception desks. But how many of these public-spirited souls are new to volunteering and how many have simply switched their time and energy from other things? Does Christine’s new regular morning at the children’s centre come at the expense of her old shift at the charity shop?

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Official figures are not encouraging. The number of people who report having formally volunteered – through a group, club or organisation – at least once a month has flatlined since the turn of the century, standing in the last Cabinet Office survey of 2015-16 at 14.2 million, or 27% of the adult population.

The value of this volunteering to the economy was estimated at £22.6bn, down £200m on the previous year because people were spending less time doing it – an average of 15.7 minutes a day for women and 11.3 for men, compared to 16.3 and 12.3 respectively in 2014-15.

We should add to these figures those for informal volunteering – helping people who are not relatives and doing so not through a group, club or organisation, at least monthly – which stood at 18 million, or 34% of the population, in 2015-16. Again, these numbers have stayed broadly unchanged since 2000.

The data is far from definitive and other indicators do suggest a slightly more positive story. The Charities Aid Foundation’s annual UK Giving report, for instance, says that 89% of people “did something charitable” in 2016, including volunteering, up sharply from 79% in 2015.

It is important also to recognise that Volunteers’ Week is as much about recruiting new volunteers as it is thanking existing ones. But are charities doing enough on this front?

Research just published by the thinktank New Philanthropy Capital found that when 300 charity leaders were asked to identify “the most important thing to help the charity sector increase its impact in society”, only 4% chose “engaging users, stakeholders and volunteers”. By contrast, 31% chose funding and 23% public profile.

Commenting on Twitter, Karl Wilding, director of public policy and volunteering at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), which runs Volunteers’ Week in association with volunteer coordinating bodies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, said: “There is most definitely an issue there – income as the priority.”

After the damaging fundraising scandals of the past two years, you might expect charities to be anxious to present a different image. And as NCVO chief executive Sir Stuart Etherington said in a letter to member organisations earlier this year, we need to do much more to value volunteers, expand opportunities for them and stimulate a national debate on their role in the future of public services.

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“To conceive of volunteers’ dedication as a temporary cover for cuts until the magic spending tap can be turned back on and publicly funded workers take their place is not only unrealistic, it does them a great disservice, and it overlooks the particular distinctive value that volunteers bring,” Etherington wrote.

Charities will have to do much of the heavy lifting on this themselves. The general election campaign is a useful reminder that in their 2015 manifesto, the Conservatives promised to legislate for three days’ paid volunteering leave annually for all workers in the public sector and those working for private companies employing at least 250 staff.

The unfulfilled pledge is not repeated in the Tories’ 2017 programme.

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